Venom sucks.
“Venom” is a terrible movie from start to finish; a confused, wrongheaded, compromised mess of a production in which just about every piece of filmmaking that could have possibly gone wrong does go wrong.
It’s special effects are terrible; a mass of dubious looking
amateur quality CGI filmed with a complete and utter lack of cohesion and
clarity that brings to mind some of the worst carnage of Michael Bay’s “Transformers”
work and lowers its bar.
The dialogue is cringe inducingly bad at worst and dully
pedestrian at best played out by a cast that seems to be only faintly aware of
the fact that they are all far too good to be involved in any of the schlock
that’s happening onscreen, save for Tom Hardy, more on that later.
It’s painfully forced premise, inorganically pushed through
to completion at the behest of executives that clearly share no passion for
storytelling as they do potential commerce, of ripping an antagonist out of the
mythology that it was designed to operate in to function as a hero ostensibly
overkilling thugs and corrupt security guards with no hope of defending against
his alien superpowers or fighting other aliens that look almost
indistinguishably like himself, never once coalesces into a narrative
sustainable for the 2 hours that it plays across over much less as the embarrassing
launch point for an ill-conceived shared universe.
From the lack of focus towards every element of the film
that was intended to be a selling point, including the irritating titular
symbiotic parasite who’s given no real characterization beyond a nonsensical
smart ass mouth that is never justified given his alien origin, to the utter
lack of a single sincerely compelling through-line to drive the plot from set
piece to set piece, “Venom” is a top to bottom disaster that meets just about
every low expectation I could have possibly dreamed of.
The reason why all of this has to be asserted up front is
because the scale and magnitude of “Venom’s” miscalculations are actually a
glorious wonder to be hold that almost becomes its sole redeeming value.
While the film lacks the level of sincere ambition that made
something like “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” viscerally aggravating to
think about, its ability to almost explicitly bungle just about everything that it sets out to do both small and grand, yet continue to carry itself with a level
of delusion regarding how “badass” it thinks it is compared to how almost
adorably lame it actually is, manages to keep every second of it perversely fascinating
as to how low it can go in the next scene and what levels of unintentional
hilarity lie over the horizon.
The fundamental notion of expecting franchise longevity out
of an alien creature fighting other alien creatures of the same build and
powers as himself is laughable in and of itself but from the moment the ominous
Venom symbiote makes his presence known via an embarrassing recurring trash
talking routine towards the threats and people that surround him, culminating
in an alien visitor with no experience on the planet Earth flat out introducing
himself by name to his host as Venom with no context or reasoning behind the
name choice that actually could have helped to make him an interesting character
in his own right, the movie immediately presents itself as the kind of thing
that a Fourth Grader would think is cool and mature, without realizing in the
slightest how calculatedly opposite the entire affair is.
If this reality untethered view of things from the good
money loving folks at Sony wasn’t an obvious enough sign of where things have
gone rogue, you need look no further than the performances to see just how off
the rails this entire production has gone.
Jenny Slate is quickly becoming one of my favorite working character
actresses and though she gives it her earnest, it’s ultimately for something of
a waste of a character that could have been written out for the benefit of a
tighter screenplay and runtime. Ditto for Michelle Williams whose talents are
flat out wasted on the movie and I almost feel like Riz Ahmed should qualify
for an academy award as appropriate compensation for delivering the laughably bad
transhumanistic, Elon Musk parody, James Bond villain dialogue that he delivers
with a completely straight face.
Poor Tom Hardy comes out looking the worst for wear from the
entire endeavor. Caught between some sort of unholy mixture between Jim Carrey,
Christopher Walken, and John Travolta in his prime, bad editing and embarrassing
direction leave what was intended to be a toxic and borderline self-destructive
character, indulging in his worst tendencies to ironically fulfill a greater
good to debatable ends, as a bizarrely inconsistent clown who puts the button
on just about every terrible scene that he occupies as an unintentional comedic
masterpiece.
To “Venom’s” credit, the haze of laughable writing, acting,
production values, and choppy editing does lift ever once in a while to reveal
the film that was trying to be achieved; a movie with an infinitely less
likable yet far more fascinating anti-hero of a protagonist indulging in the
most disgusting of human nature after being surrounded by it in his job for
so long as to ultimately become the monster that he was aiming to fight both
figuratively and literally.
It would have been a movie that justified the initially
projected R-rating of the premise that would have been darker, sexier,
trashier, more violent, and more exploitative.
Unfortunately for the wallets
of Sony executives, that movie also wouldn’t have sold action figures.
Fortunately for the rest of us however, that movie does at least already exist
in the form of the highly similar and vastly superior “Upgrade,” released
earlier this year.
With that superior option made available, the only reason
that I can truly recommend “Venom” for is because the depth of its failure
truly does land it in the camp of being so bad that it’s almost good. Its entertainment
value may not have been from intended reactions but the reactions are still there
and to genuinely be had.
Where I’m stopped from doing that however, beyond the gross
feeling of recommending something so cynically driven by earning a cheap buck
at the expense of a popular trend, is that this exploitation of license is not
something that I view as a laughing matter.
Not because I’m an offended “Venom” fan, which I am far from
and have brought up my distaste for modern usage of the character beyond his 90s
heyday, but because a studio shouldn’t be rewarded for mass producing
intellectually offensive crap, even if that crap is jaw droppingly awful in its
construction.
4 Turds in the Wind out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment